HODL Podcast Episode 14 was originally published on August 18, 2023.
Join Drew, Joel, and Ariana from the Hold On for Dear Life Podcast. In the episode, they discuss VaynerSports launching a new point system, Y00tes moving to the same blockchain as DeGods, PayPal’s new stablecoin, Base running the OnChain Summer campaign, and the boundless potential of NFT art.
Episode Rundown:
- VaynerSports is launching VaynerSports Points.
- Y00tes bridged from the Polygon blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain.
- PayPal launched its stablecoin.
- Base is a new L2 blockchain built by Coinbase.
- NFT art galleries are growing in popularity.
About Holder
Holder is a CRM and marketing automation platform for web3 brands and creators. They help businesses engage and communicate with their customers on the blockchain. With Holder, companies can manage customer data, track user engagement and automate marketing processes. For more information visit our website.
Podcast Transcript
Read the Full Podcast Transcript Below:
Welcome back everybody to the Hold On For Dear Life podcast. This is episode 14 where the Holder team sits down sometimes with the guests. Today we're not with the guests, but we talk about the latest news and updates in the wide world of Web3. That would have been another good name for this podcast, you know, playing on the wild world of sports.
But if you are not familiar with Holder, we are a Web3 CRM marketing automation platform. And today I'm joined by our head of engineering, Joel Moser, and, myself, Drew Beechler. And Ariana, which is her first-time appearance on the Holder podcast. So welcome Ariana. She runs our marketing for Holder. So welcome to the podcast.
We've got a lot of news and updates and stories today to jump into across the NFT and kind of broader crypto space. But maybe one that we'll start with what's in the Holder universe is VaynerSports. Is launching its VaynerSports points reward system here they haven't kind of announced the official launch date, but sometime in September. VaynerSports and VaynerSports passed an early customer and partners of ours and some, some good friends over there.
And so we're incredibly excited about this launch personally as we're helping kind of power some of it, but even kind of outside of the holder universe, it's pretty interesting to see kind of their evolution. So I thought we'd just share some of the kind of highlights around what are VaynerSports points reward system and kind of what they're doing with this.
So VaynerSports pass was minted out a little over a year ago and originally this sports pass was kind of engineered around building a community of sports fans. They minted it out very, very quickly and kind of, they had a lot of unique mechanics around different kinds of metadata around the sports passes, whether they have icons for football or baseball or a handful of different kinds of sports.
Based on the past that you owned, you know, you have access to different raffles and experiences within the community and they went all in on how you use metadata around a lot of this kind of like different passes have a lot different kind of value in the ecosystem.
They've been building towards this rewards point system for a long time and they're trying to blend a lot of on-chain and off-chain IRL plus digital kind of ecosystems.
The launch of this reward system is going to also culminate with the launch of a PFP. You will mint a VaynerSports Pass PFP and at the time that you mint the PFP, it will look at how many other VaynerSports Passes you hold, the kind of rarity of those VaynerSports Passes, and then based on the VaynerSports Passes you hold and the rarity of those, that's kind of your initial like bank of points, basically that you will receive in your wallet.
Then they're going to have this VSP shop where you can redeem these points to bid on sporting events or bid on kind of exclusive access, custom items, and everything from that realm. They alluded, this is season zero starting in September. So I think kind of, they're trying to make this you know, similar to a fortnight or League of legends kind of season where they can refresh things and bring a lot of new, fresh aspects to it regularly.
This is super exciting launching in September, so keep an eye out for it. Just a shout-out to their team.
And then if either you have thoughts around it, but the things I think that are most interesting around it are this blend of on-chain and off-chains. The points are not going to be on-chain so they have the on-chain aspect of like the NFT and the off-chain aspect of some of the points and how those are kind of reflected.
They've taken a ton of time to go deep around the legal aspect of all of this.
And, you know, you will have to pay for your PFP because that shows like a trade of value and they've gone and done a ton of the really hard legal work to make, all of this above board. I'd say not everyone does in the web3 world. Maybe usually it's because they're just a PFP project and they don't have this other side of things that they need to make sure is all aboard.
From the beginning, VaynerSports and the VaynerSports sports pass team have been very focused on, how do we bridge like IRL and digital. You owned the past because you wanted access to IRL experiences, like, games, meet and greets, and things like that. They're kind of living into that as well, where this like idea of the kind of blending a lot of the on-chain off-chain IRL, and digital is just really, really unique.
Maybe, they have details in their medium article, but just what went into all of the thinking of it? And maybe a lot of it was tax reasons or legal reasons. It just makes it easier if it's like all one system that can be easily audited without needing all the weird blockchain technology in the way sometimes.
Especially if it's for sales tax or anything weird like that.
Yeah, and I think A lot of it revolves around what they want it to be. Especially like today, the way that some of the raffles work, they are taxable events, in some ways too, because you're getting something of value.
And so they've structured it that they want the rewards to be nontaxable, events. And so I think a lot of it is around like making sure that kind of the points and the rewards can't be securities and things like that. they've done a lot of that legwork.
And I think too, it's part of their, brand the mission of the company as a whole is around like building you know, the premier community for sports fans. And so they're just also trying to like to lean into a much more maybe approachable community as well for people that might not be into NFTs or Web3.
And so I think it's just kind of like starting to lean into some of that as well. And kind of have a foot in kind of both worlds. But yeah, I don't know entirely.
Another big announcement in the NFT industry and space over the last couple of weeks is that DeGods and Dust Labs announced a few days ago that Y00ts, which is the secondary collection to DeGods that originally launched on Solana and bridged over to the polygon blockchain a handful of months ago is going to do a bridge actually over to ETH mainnet.
Maybe just to kind of back up a second, the DeGod's universe originally was Solana NFT project. It was the largest NFT project on Solana by far. Most popular Frank, DeGods has just been a huge influencer and character on Twitter and in crypto.
So it's kind of just built this unique cult following around it. It's been just an incredibly popular project. They launched a spinoff project called Y00tes that has a much larger collection size than DeGods. Eventually, these were the largest collections on Solana and they decided that they wanted to move off of Solana and move into the Ethereum ecosystem.
And so they bridged DeGods to Ethereum and they bridged Y00tes to Polygon. They were very upfront that they received a 3 million grant actually from Polygon to bridge Y00tes to Polygon. And that's why they decided to bridge them to two. And so now it's kind of interesting, you know, Frank quoted here, "Hey, there's no bad blood. We're just doing this to unite DeGods and Y00tes back onto one chain and in one community and one ecosystem".
And they're returning that a hundred percent of the 3 million grant back to Polygon. But it's just kind of like a very interesting Move and announcement, I would say for the ecosystem.
So I'm just curious, maybe some thoughts from either of you around is this a big deal? Why or why not? You know, why do you all think maybe they're moving? And just even maybe what it kind of means. Broadly around, yeah, immutability and kind of you know, the open, transparent, and interoperable nature of Web3 in general.
Yeah, this type of thing is really interesting because there are always discussions around provenance and, what existed first. Which smart contract was deployed first? Where was the art deployed first? All of this like what came first? And there's all this weird talk about all of that.
When you Deploy it somewhere else or bridges somewhere else is it the same thing? And I think that it's really hard to decide, you know when you break it down into technical terms, we're really just talking about bits. And it's just data stored in a database basically.
And so we're just moving it from one database to another. So does the provenance move along with it? I don't know. Some would probably say yes, and some would probably say no. I'm sure there are people that own Y00tes that are like, seriously, we're moving again. Why? Why did we move in the first place? Why are you like we're moving back?
That would be one thing, you know, and I haven't followed all of this super closely, but, it is very interesting from a technical perspective because it doesn't really matter. It's like we're moving this data from SQL to Mongo. Okay. It's the same data.
We're migrating it and putting it over there now. And now we're going to maintain both for a while. Okay. Like I don't know. It's just interesting that this would not be a discussion point prior, but also in the same vein, if like, Okay. Somebody modifies a piece of art or a baseball card or something like that.
Is it the same thing or they like rip it apart and then perfectly reconstruct it with paper, down to the molecule? Is it the same card? Cause it was ripped in half. I don't know.
Even though it was reconstructed technically. I don't know. Maybe. Could it be? So I don't know. There are lots of discussions there. It's, it's just kind of interesting that how up-in-arms people get about a lot of this.
Yeah. With that, I was wondering if it would impact the value of their assets on the other blockchains now. Do you think the assets on the previous blockchains will increase in value because of this? Or do you think it won't have an impact?
Yeah, it's a good question. I've seen some other bridges as well across a handful of different NFT projects. You know, people have bridge from Avax to Ethereum and others.
I'd say DeGods is probably one of the more successful ones because you own the asset. It's a token. So you can't force people to bridge your stuff too. If you look at DeGods on Solana, even there you can still like buy DeGods on Solana.
I don't know what the price has done for DeGods on Solana now that they're even over on ETH. I'm sure you can buy Y00tes as well, still on Solana. And I'm sure there will be, some historical value to those that like stay on Solana, over time in the same way that there's some unique value to, unwrapped punks and, and then things like that.
And people were like, well, what's the, like, you know, what's the real punk and everything.
It's just created this really unique ecosystem around, to your point, like, what is like the real asset was the first asset.
DeGods had a lot of really unique gamification though, around if you didn't bridge and if you did bridge your DeGod to Ethereum. They had lots of carrots and lots of sticks in terms of how to like punish people who don't and also like reward people who do and things like that. And I would say more so than any other community I've seen, at least they were more successful in incentive structures that actually did get people to bridge over.
looks like 560 DeGods are still on Solana.
It's interesting actually now that you kind of say that I'm, I'm making a, Connection to a different parallel of like software pricing and software upgrades. I mean, cause really all this is, is an upgrade.
Is it a new version of DeGods or of Y00tes? bridging is saying like, Hey, we need to deploy a new version of the application that is fundamentally different. It's a breaking change. If you don't want to do it, that's fine. You can still use the old version, but you're not going to get any of the updates.
It's the same thing that software companies do all the time. Whenever they deploy a new version, that fundamentally is change. I mean, I listened to a lot of the 37 Signals podcast rework and they talk about how they still maintain a lot of their old systems. They don't allow anybody to sign up for new ones, but they still run like base camp four or base camp three.
And like there was like fireside or there's like a little to do list app thing that they still run and it's like stupidly lightweight and it's not great. And they run hay, like, but they run all of these and some of them they run for free. I think one of them is fully free and they've decided they're just going to run it and pay the infrastructure costs, which is minimal because it's not a lot but it's kind of the same thing.
It's still there. You know, it's still over on Solana. You can still own it over there if you want to continue to own it over there. But if you want the new stuff, we're not going to make any upgrades, like if there's a major security vulnerability, they'll update it. You know, you can't do that in the same way with blockchains, but usually there's not major security vulnerabilities like that.
At least not on an individual contract level. Yeah, it's just kind of interesting that it's like, yeah, you want the new stuff we're going to bridge over. So, this is not really any different and that's what I think is interesting. I've seen other projects and usually this causes them to flounder.
If they're not already a big project. So I think it works if you're already kind of a larger project. But yeah, there was one project I got that I have like two of the same token because they made a mistake in the contract. So they had to like redeploy a brand new contract and I got a new token.
They look the exact same. So what's the difference? It's like one's a new version. One's completely broken.
Yeah. Even the Illuminati and Truth did this where they deployed an entirely new contract changed the artwork of the old contract entirely. And it's some, you know, beam basically, but everyone has the same one and they issued.
All new NFTs that run on a new contract that could do royalty enforcements on it. And. Love Illuminati, love truth, love their ecosystem, but it tanked it entirely. And yeah, I like haven't seen it come back since at least from like a value perspective, which is, which is interesting.
This is a bit different though, because they're moving from a tier two, I don't know what, you know, Solana ranks from like a market cap perspective, but it's tier two chain to the largest NFT chain with Ethereum. Looking back, they actually did the original bridge in April of 2023. Part of the incentives were really low royalty fees on Ethereum and they covered all of the gas fees for the first 24 hours. So like you were incentivized to do it soon.
They also just had a really strong community. Like, I feel like they've been one of the, the brands that have been able to overcome bad press and things like that over the last year and just continue to grow.
Even since that announcement, they've launched a couple other things that like they've had to put some egg on their face and they've had to come out and say, Hey, this wasn't that great and things like that.
But I think they also like are under the impression and definitely the belief that like all press for them is good press. They'd rather do something that was terrible and get a lot of attention for it. That's just kind of the, DeGod's brand, you know, and it fits.
I think admitting that you screwed up is way more valuable than trying to always be right.
Willing to be wrong and then admitting when you are, it makes me give them a lot more respect.
Yeah. Very true. But still even, yeah. Y00tes, there are still 554 that are on Solana. And, you know, out of the 15, 000 collection or so.
It'll be interesting to see kind of how it evolves. I've been watching it just kind of from afar. I'm not a Y00tes or DeGods holder, but, I think this will be really interesting.
I forgot. They also have Bitcoin originals too. So like they now have NFTs on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana. Four chains, immutable assets, quote unquote which is, yeah, which is really interesting. Yeah.
I mean, cause yes, it's immutable, but that doesn't mean that it's the same or that the old one's going to get the latest stuff.
Yeah. Very true.
That's so interesting that they keep jumping to different blockchains. I wonder if it's part of their marketing strategy. It'll be interesting to see in the future if they decide to move to another new blockchain. That does give them press and then constantly keeps their name out there in the industry.
That is a really good point. And I think the thing with them is they could do whatever they want and they're kind of like, we will do whatever we want and you all are along for the ride. They do care about the community a lot.
But , yeah, I could totally see them deciding like, you know what, let's hop to base or whatever. Just doing it for fun. The marketing aspect of it keeps them fresh.
I don't know where they would go. That would. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, like
they're, they're now at the top, you know, I think part of it might have been that they made a bet on Solana and then it was like, ah, Solana has infrastructure problems or whatever.
I don't know. I've heard about that over time, but then it's like, then they moved to Polygon and they're like, ah, maybe, maybe Polygon wasn't quite the right move for our entire ecosystem. Let's like keep them together in Ethereum. Ethereum is like kind of the top dog in that space. You know, people have been saying that Bitcoin might become that at some point for immutable assets with ordinals and with some other developments that are coming down the pipe.
But I don't know, you can go back and forth on which one's the top. But, you know, it's like, are you going to move from what's on top even like, yeah, sure, they can move to Bitcoin, but if they're already on Bitcoin How does that work? Would they move to base? Base would have to become the third one on top, which it could be.
But since it's an L two, like it's more of a scaling solution, potentially not necessarily a core.
I think it's definitely an interesting thought on like marketing strategy, but I don't know where they would go that would add value to their ecosystem, unless they eventually needed more speed or something. And that's why they were going back to an L2 or L3 or something.
I could see him just YOLOing everything into Bitcoin ordinals. And, it wouldn't surprise me. I think that they would have lots of challenges, but you're saying it wouldn't be off brand, but yeah, it would not be off brand.
Anyway, though, I think it is like also like important note when they were the most popular project on Solana, major, major success they had a ton of support from the actual Solana foundation and Solana devs.
You know what I mean? Like they were basically like, if you listen to a lot of like podcasts with Frank early on, like he was like, Oh yeah.
Like. They were basically helping us write our smart contract to make sure, it was optimized and doing the right things. They were very hands on helpful with them. And so I think they really bolster a lot of the Solana ecosystem. I don't know if Solana wants to be known as like the NFT ecosystems.
I'm curious, like how they feel about losing DeGods, but I think they've got their own challenges that aren't around an NFT project moving off of our chain. They have lots of other, I think, opportunities that they're leaning into that are outside of that. But I know, yeah, early on when they started it was Solana's up and coming chain and they're probably not going to get the attention of a core Ethereum dev to come and help them with their smart contract like they did with Solana.
It's like a startup trying to get a big contract with Salesforce or something. It's like Salesforce doesn't have the time for them. They're not going to provide enough value. You know, it's like any, any small company trying to go to any large company to say like, Hey, we want a big contract.
And they're like, why? Yeah.
They got a lot of value out of that. And I think it was yeah, and mutually beneficial in many, many ways, for a long time. And so, I don't know. Never know. They might still do something back to Solana, but all that to say, I think, yeah, their brand is that we want to do things that people haven't done before and we want to be kind of unexpected, you know, and yeah, who knows?
We'll see.
Their community appreciates that about them if they're following them to all the different blockchains and still purchasing from them.
Oh yeah. They have one of the most loyal communities for sure.
In non NFT news, moving on a little bit, over the last week, PayPal announced on the same day on August 7th, their own stable coin, PYUSD on Ethereum.
In partnership with Paxos who is a stable coin provider. They actually powered the Binance stable coin, BUSD for a very long time until that was shut down. And so actually this is a big win, for Paxos. Now having a new very major kind of stable coin that they're running now that Binance USD is spun down.
But it's fully backed by US dollar deposits, short term US treasuries or similar cash equivalents fully redeemable one for one us dollars and starting only for us customers.
This is one of the first major US , especially traditional FinTech, you companies to offer its own stable coin and crypto token.
Today it's just in PayPal, but they announced that it will have plans to integrate it into Venmo in the future as well. But I think this is a pretty big announcement, a kind of big deal. But yeah, maybe just kind of open it up I'll just read a couple quotes around why are they doing this?
So this is a quote from PayPal, senior vice president, general manager of blockchain, crypto and digital currencies. Jose Fernandez, the Ponte " stable coins are the killer application from blockchains right now. There are inherent advantages and costs programmability, settlement time and more".
He continued to add that "the market is primed for new entrants that are fully backed" and unlike Tether and some others that are fully regulated, they keep really hitting on this that like, Hey, we are fully backed. You know, one to one to a dollar or two, you know, a dollar equivalent and that it's fully regulated.
And then continue on with the quote, stable coins are something that we cannot just sit out. He said I feel like that kind of says a lot around like, why are they doing this? But maybe I'll kind of open it up.
It's super cool that PayPal understands that the future is digital currency and that's clear because they're making it more mainstream and popular to get into crypto and Web3.
And I think it helps to naturally onboard the average American or even the average consumer to get them more comfortable with this kind of digital currency.
I kind of find it funny because PayPal is like the originator of digital currencies almost, you know you hear, I listened to the all in podcasts a lot and I'm a fan of like David Sachs and his whole background was at PayPal way back in the day. And he's talked about this quite a bit on the podcast, even though like they have tried to do their own like quote unquote kind of currency for a very long time actually.
And just kind of, It feels like now the market is kind of ready for it, but I think to the end consumer, they're at such a size so like for context, they have 435 million active accounts. There's like a few hundred thousand active daily accounts on Ethereum. This is massive. They're at a size where even you don't have to know even that it's crypto in the backend at all.
This is more around cost effectiveness and it looks really good for marketing headlines. It looks good to web three people, but I think the average and consumer is just going to see, I have dollars in my PayPal account that I want to transfer out to somewhere else.
And it's just a better way of managing treasuries. Like, honestly, I think that that's kind of what it boils down to. And they've been trying to do this. It feels like for a very long time.
Actually I'm kind of glad but I'm also like very much not surprised that somebody was finally going to do this and especially being PayPal already being in digital currencies . One of my friends who's an engineer works at a payments company and he was talking about the way that they move money and banks and automated clearing house like the way that that works is like It's literally like just files being transferred.
Money doesn't usually change hands. It's just like, Hey, this person's account went up by this. It went down by this. It's like, yep, that's literally a blockchain transaction.
Yeah. It's all digital already anyway. It's just now they're aiming it.
Well, and he was saying, he's like, it's a little clunky if I'm honest, compared to the world that we've been in. He's been in a B2B SaaS company.
Cause we used to work together at Prior company and it was not financial, it was business communications software. So it was just really funny to enter into the finance space. It's just so different. Just, the way he was talking, I was like, yeah, now I see.
There are some problems that he was describing that it was like, those just don't exist on a blockchain. Or it's like, I could see why now. There's more value in it in the way that the transactions are reported. Like I already thought that, but it's almost more confirming that it's like, Oh, they're already just like transferring bits with files using FTP, which is not necessarily a great protocol for that.
What's the difference than doing it on a blockchain? So it's, you know, if we're already just transferring bits, it's so much easier. And if you're trying to get people to onboard into web three, which I don't think this is actually going to onboard people into web three. I think that's probably one of the downsides is people might think it will, but I don't know that it will.
Cause I think PayPal is going to obfuscate enough of that away from the average consumer that they're just not going to know that they have a wallet under the hood. So Maybe it'll get somebody to think about it or consider it, but I don't know that it's necessarily going to bring those 400 million plus quote unquote wallets into, Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever.
But it does not surprise me that this is coming. The fact that you said people have tried to do this before. I'm like, yeah, that checks out. And it's definitely easier now.
Why I think this is a big deal now too, it's a testament that major companies, publicly traded companies see the benefits and are confident enough in the future of the technology and the future of regulation and the future of U S securities laws and everything, that they're going to make this bet.
And to me, that's really promising and exciting as well.
I am curious where that's going to go since it's. Coinbase has been reported as being like put on notice from the sec and like a lot of these other crypto companies have been put on notice. It's like, okay, so PayPal, they're huge. I'm curious what's going to happen, but if they've already got the backing and they already have so much legal parts.
That they're definitely the licenses and everything to that.
It's a good thing, from all that perspective of like, it's showing confidence in the system. And I think we'll push, yeah, at least kind of regulators and laws and a good direction, hopefully as well.
Do you think it'll lead to more maybe like specifically government adoption of stable coins?
I don't know. This starts to get into like definitely an area of crypto that I don't spend as much time into. I'm more of an NFT degen, you know and less of a, less of a U S treasuries economist. So to caveat all of that But I definitely have read a book and, you know, I stayed at a holiday inn last night.
So I've got some thoughts on this. I'm just kidding. I I don't know that there's definitely, I have read kind of a handful of books that are really interesting around like CBDCs, you know, central bank backed digital currencies, CBDCs. Yeah. There's no question that the US has at least like talk, is talking about it, has talked about it, has, you know, performed some tests.
There are a handful conspiracy theories as well around, crypto competing with the US dollar as the global, reserve currency in many ways. Will the US launch its own, you know, digital currency and things like that. I don't know.
I think it'd be really interesting. I think definitely we'll see over the next year, probably a handful of other companies launching their own stable coins. I was talking to somebody the other day that I think kind of stable coins are having their moment very similar to how NFT projects did a couple of years ago.
And, you know, DAO before that, like everybody is jumping on. There will be a private or public stable coin that many companies launch, I think, over the next 12 to 18 months. And I think this probably opens the floodgate for some of that and for some others to do that.
Because back to just like functionally 10 X better. I think it probably saves a ton of time on like, and these are the things that are kind of way above my head. But but I understand like a root level, like treasury management, in all of that sort of stuff, especially at big, large corporations and the cost of managing actual dollars and assets and things like that.
They actually provide a ton of cost savings on that front regardless of how cool, innovative, good marketing headlines it creates. And so I think that you'll see a lot more people kind of lean in, lean in there, especially.
Speaking of publicly traded companies and in crypto. Over the last week, Coinbase has also launched the GA generally available version of base, which is their L two on Optimism's O Source op stack. They launched this massive campaign.
If you don't know, layer two base it is, Coinbase is native layer two. They're building lots of native coinbase integrations into it. It's built specifically for security scale, really low transaction costs developer friendly tools. Their test net went live in February and then the main net went live last week. And so to promote the launch of this, they created this month long campaign or a few week long campaign called on chain summer, celebrating art, gaming, and culture community.
The ultimate goal of getting people to use the base chain to mint NFTs on base, et c. And each day they have these commemorative NFTs you can mint in a variety of different ways, have tons of different partners, major brands from Coca Cola to NFT brands like Parallel and Friends with Benefit and Cosimo Medici and Showtime, Zora, Rainbow, OpenSea, tons of huge partners.
They really just brought a lot into kind of this ecosystem to make this kind of this really big launch campaign. So I've just found the campaign to be really interesting. I think the launch of base is pretty exciting. It's, you know, Coinbase is probably, we were talking about this before the show.
Someone can fact check us, but we think that they're probably the first publicly traded company to launch a public blockchain at least. And so I think that's just in and of itself pretty monumental and interesting, but I think they've been doing a ton of fun marketing promotional campaigns around this.
They've been able to rally like the entire ecosystem, like on day one, the amount of people that were integrated into base was absurd in terms of like developer tools and applications. And so I think that's just been really interesting with how they've launched this. Has been really, really successful so far.
It was super smart of Base to get Coca Cola on board and get them to launch some NFTs because I think that brought in a whole different side of consumers.
The Coca Cola campaign was called masterpiece. With this, they designed the classic Coke bottle to look like art. And actually the art was AI generated, which is super cool. So it used eight different artists, some being modern and some being historical artists.
For example, the scream, the famous painting from Edvard Munch.
Yeah, I minted two of those actually, the Coca Cola ones. I've been kind of playing around with it. I bridged a little bit of eth over the base and I've been collecting some of the, the on chain summer NFTs throughout this week.
I grabbed the Scream Coca Cola one and one of the others. Gas fees are like cents, which is amazing. Like 10 cents. And I've been loving that. But it also is pretty cool artwork. I think the Coca Cola one specifically has already had, I don't know, close to half a million dollars in sales, which I think is pretty large.
This is not Coke's first NFT project though. They have not done a ton in the space, but they had one that launched on Ethereum last year or the year before to kind of varying success. But I do think it is interesting that, yeah, Coinbase has been able to get some of the stalwart traditional brands as well involved.
Personally, I thought it was cool, but to be also honest, I kind of thought it was out of left field.
Like it just doesn't like match with anything else in the on chain summer promo. Some of the other things kind of have like a thread throughout them and I get there's like general like gaming, art and community kind of focus with it. And so like this is an art thing, but it did feel a little like unconnected in some ways though.
The art was cool and it was nice to have another big major brand name in there. But yeah, it was, it was kind of interesting. That was, I think yesterday or two days ago, even from when we're recording this.
One of the things that I think is really cool is that indelible labs is integrated or will be integrated directly with base. So you can build NFTs.
Which is pretty cool. Which
if you haven't, I've talked about indelible a few times. It's just like, it's very similar to like Bueno and a lot of the other contract builder tools. But it's entirely on chain. I think he might have some off chain potential things coming, but it started out very much on chain. It's very bootstrapped, community driven, and it's pretty cool.
The guy who does it is a pretty good dude. So, I just thought it was really cool that that was coming. I saw that he was announcing it, and then, yeah. That's about the only thing that I've followed with the untrained summer stuff. Cause I just, I've been too busy
lately. Yeah. Are they, doing a drop or anything this week, do you know, or just they announced, they have native base support.
I think they're just announcing that they have native basis as it launches on the 20th. You can see on the upcoming one, it's not active yet technically. But yeah, it's going to be.
The thing I also love about like what they've done is they don't have just the collections that they physically partnered with Coinbase, base did, but also they have a community section that there's lots of other platforms and products that are launching, you know, support for base. And they're just kind of like highlighting them, which has been cool.
Indelible is a full launch. They have a day dedicated to it right in between manifold and mirrors, well, this club and then there's highlight and they're going live even before manifold and it's pretty cool.
I don't know if it's a testament to just a they're like ecosystem building team like incredible and being able to just like get, you know, garner attention and interest in like developer resources to build some of these integrations or if it's just really a big testament to like the OP stack and like optimisms, you know, stack that base could launch using that stack.
And if you were integrated with optimism already, basically you came integrated on day one into base.
That's kind of been an unlock and I think we'll see a lot more companies and we've seen some already. I think they also are going to be building on the optimism OP stack or a similar style without needing to truly build, their own layer two and things.
And I think that's, we'll see more and more of that in the future as well.
One other really cool piece around the on chain summer campaign. Is that if you DM on chainsummer. eth in Coinbase Wallet or Converse or any XMTP wallet messenger you can text them GM and you can subscribe to daily mint alerts via XMTP messaging. And so I've been loving these every day.
I get a message from onchainsummer. eth about what that day is, you know, launch is, and there's a special link to go mint you know, NFT or some other promotion. I just thought this is a super cool, a just application of wallet messaging and a lot of what we're building at Holder and helping brands power.
But I think it's also just a cool way to keep, a web three native way of subscribing and keeping up to date with on chain summer. I have no idea what the reception has been like or how many people have actually opted into this, but I think we'll start to see this more and more often.
I love some of these new use cases around wallet messaging and subscribing to updates.
which has been pretty cool.
On top of talking about NFTs, recently the CEO of super chief gallery, his name's Edward Zipco, is leading a project that's actually unifying art galleries.
Basically Zipco has already got eight different galleries together. And he already has the Paris NFT factory, gallery in Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Canada, and Australia, a part of this community that will be promoting the power of boundless potential and NFT art.
His goal is to get 50 different NFT galleries together across the globe.
And so they announced this ECC in Paris last month, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is, yeah, this is pretty cool. I think it's been interesting to see. The idea around like NFT galleries has become more and more popular.
I remember two years ago at NFT NYC, I like stumbled by a NFT gallery that was like across the street from the coworking space that I was in. And I was like, Oh yeah, I'll go check that out. And it's a really interesting space. It's still there and live today. In New York I think it's on Madison Avenue, but you know, it's been interesting to see some of these kind of physical spaces pop up that are just around digital art, letting you purchase, you know, the NFT and digital art right there.
There is someone here in Indianapolis that was going to be putting together an NFT gallery. They're part of our Indy three community here, but I don't think that ever fully materialized, but it's been interesting to see. Early on, there were lots of people wanting to build galleries especially in the coastal cities.
There's, the art blocks gallery in Venice and the bright moments gallery, their bright moments has also been doing more like traveling galleries.
They've had one in New York before as well, and it's on to, you know, other cities that kind of moves on every so often. And then there's also, I want to say there might be an art blocks gallery or a couple other ones and Martha, Texas, which is like, you know, exploded as this. Art hub in the middle of nowhere, Texas.
It's basically the new Jackson hole down there in terms of land and big properties . But this tiny small town in Texas that there's just really expensive art galleries and things there now, and kind of particularly around generative art and, and, and FTR, which has been interesting.
Anyway, I kind of tend to follow some of these every once in a while. Regardless what's interesting to me around it or what, like the things that I think about around just how digital art and traditional art, if you will, we'll blend over time. Will we have NFT galleries, you know what I mean?
In the future or will there be a digital art section of a traditional art gallery? Will it just be fully integrated?
It's unique to see more and more, galleries. Digital arts definitely not been seen in the same value, at least in the traditional art world so far, but I think this is an interesting update.
Yeah. I think NFT galleries are really interesting. The hardest part is that they're touting this as a some people might call it a bug. They're calling it a feature that our work can travel across the globe in the split second. Well, yeah, it doesn't have to travel. It can be in both places at the same time, technically.
Whereas traditional art can't do that. And there's something to that.
This kind of goes back to the, what's the original, what's the provenance discussion. If I create a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, and I try to paint the old way.
And I do all of these things that make it as close as possible down to the microscopic level, almost indetectable. Like is it the same? Most people are going to say no, you know, and this is like, it is the same thing. It's just digitally represented in two places at the same time.
That's probably their biggest hurdle. I think where it is really cool NFT art can move. Because it's digital, because video is a possibility and everything. And that's really just digital art necessarily, not necessarily NFT art. But yeah, that's what I think is probably one of the cooler things.
And also tV, image frame technology has come such a long way. That now it can look as seamless as a true piece of art. It doesn't really, it doesn't necessarily have to look like a TV. It can actually look like art, you know, 8K resolution or higher. Yeah. Whereas, you know, just a couple of years ago, I mean, like pixel density was just not where it needed to be to make that actually a seamless experience.
Yeah, I think that's a big thing of like the technology of the actual medium of display is really, really huge because that would be worth going to see, you know what I mean? Like that's a bit like, yeah, it's the going to see the real scream that is in Norway versus just seeing a picture of it on my computer or a print of it.
You know the reason you go to see something artwork is to see the original, you know what I mean? And quote unquote, original or whatever.
It's like people don't just, I mean, people do stare pictures of mountains all day, but they also like to go and see the mountain themselves too.
Yeah.
I don't know if I feel like it's a good or bad thing or kind of where we'll evolve as a society of preferences and things like that. But I think the medium is so different, does it need to be consumed in the same way that art has been in the past?
That's, what's the most interesting about digital art is all of the other ways you can consume, interact, and engage with that art.
That's not just going to visit it in a gallery. Though I think that the gallery set of things provides a certain level of weight and value to that art that maybe digital art has not always had.
Yep. In the same way that like seeing, you know, the ringer the swan or the goose ringer, you know, go for whatever million dollars on a Sotheby's auction you know, brought a ridiculous amount of value, weight, and a ridiculous amount of credibility to the digital art and like NFT art space that benefits the ecosystem as a whole, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see kind of how galleries evolve over time and kind of where we go from here.
Like a NFT gallery, it doesn't always have to have the same art in it. It can change like however frequently they want it to change. So I think that'll be a cool part too of they can replace new art every month if they want to. And then, that way, have more people coming in and even have like the same visitors coming back each month.
Yeah, it's definitely easier to change out. The, one thing that I will also say about traditional art is like, I am not going to even claim that I know anything about the art world in general. So everything I just said could also be totally crap, but It's just like kind of an interesting drawing parallels.
Yeah. The traditional art world is very inaccessible and siloed, and that is a feature, not a bug in many ways. And so there are reasons why, you know, the traditional art world has not want fractionalized art and has not wanted it to be kind of accessible to the average consumer.
Yeah, the Louvre does not want all of their art to be easily seamlessly viewed anywhere in the world.
And neither do any of the people that own the art that's hanging, you know, in, the Louvre too. And so. Yeah, so it'll be interesting, I think, kind of just what, what happens from there. But kind of regardless, it's been fun to kind of watch that space grow and expand for sure. Well, with that, I am going to sign us off here for the 14th episode of the Hold On For Dear Life podcast.
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